From his on-stage booty shake (my favorite) to his Lake Minnetonka purification ceremony with Apollonia, fans ate it up and Purple Rain topped the box office while the corresponding album, which hit shelves on June 25, 1984, has sold over 20 million copies to-date, according to Billboard. “When Doves Cry” and “Let’s Go Crazy” reached number one the Hot 100 pop chart and the soundtrack sat atop the Billboard Albums chart for 24 weeks, also known as six months, which meant America didn’t get a Prince breather until sometime in the winter of 1985. But let’s be honest, by then, middle America and the South were probably just getting wind of the tiny talent and the Purple Rain parade probably marched it’s way into Fargo territory and then below the Mason-Dixon line. Let you never again wonder why there are such rabid Prince fans among us.

In the spring of 1984, Lee Greenwood released a song that would forever shape his career and become an American anthem. “The first time I put it onstage, I recognized that we touched the heart of America,” Greenwood said of “God Bless the USA.” “And it just got momentum like I had never had a song before.” The patriotic song also touched the heart of the country music community, many of whom still love it to this day.

Remember that human sacrifice in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom? Or the monster-in-the-microwave scene from Gremlins? Coincidentally, both of those movies were produced or directed by Steven Spielberg, and maybe not-so-coincidentally, it was Spielberg who suggested it was time for a new rating in between PG and R. These days PG-13 movies are lucrative for major studios, because they bring in both teens and adults.

When I was a kid I went into a music store and decided I wanted to try out heavy metal. I bought a copy of Ride The Lightning on cassette. That night I lay in bed with my boom box beside me, listening to it over and over, absolutely thunderstruck. I listened all night long. I remember watching the sun come up through the window. When I got up that morning I was a different person than I was the night before.

Between the Beastie Boys‘ boundless wordplay, the Dust Brothers’ genre-melding production and more samples than anyone could afford to put on an album in 2014, Paul’s Boutique is now considered an inarguable classic. It’s not just the Beastie’s magnum opus — it’s one of the greatest hip-hop albums ever made.B iased by the Beastie’s goofy, borderline frat-y debut, music writers dismissed their second offering, either hating it or damning it as a fun-but-lightweight effort. One critic even complained they lacked the “cool” delivery of two-hit wonder Tone-Loc.

What the small-town Minnesota story may lack in self-defense training and glow-in-the-dark paint drumming pizza parties, it more than makes up for in Denise Richards’s Mount Rushmore headdress / waltz with a life-size stuffed Jesus doll, Kirsten Dunst tap dancing while applying make-up to corpses, and Kirstie Alley as the one of the original (and perhaps most deadly) Crazy Stage Moms. Also, the accents — oh, the accents

As a teenager she became a victim of a boyfriend, Rick Salomon, who filmed a sex tape with her that later went viral under the title 1 Night in Paris. “It was devastating because that was someone I was with for a few years. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully trust any man again after that. It was just the most hurtful and awful thing that anyone could do to a little girl. I was very young, it wasn’t my fault.”